Maryland Crab Soup Diversion

Hurricane Sandy is raining hell on my family on the Delmarva Peninsula. Everyone is battened down, provisioned up and hoping the power stays on. The rainfall totals plus the wind predictions are dire, and there will be washed out roads, ruined beaches, downed trees, flooding, nothing good.

It's nervous-making. To keep the nerves at bay, my sister is cooking. Here's a recipe we worked on together and we think perfected. Crab Soup. For those in the know, there are two main kinds of crab soup, She-Crab and Maryland Crab. She-Crab is amazing, and full of butter, cream and brandy. I don't make that one. This recipe is the tomato based Maryland Crab Soup. It's good for what ails you.  It's the only thing my son has asked me to make him since he went off to school. I got a 4am text that said I want crab soup. So I made it for him. It was yummy, and it's the only soup I don't end up throwing the last bit out, because we eat it all.

image nabbed from ibreakplates.com

Yeah, mine's a little processed, but extremely flexible, and it's a great base to start from.  There's a million ways to make this. Here's what you need to make mine besides a huge pot and a hungry kid:*

1 package Knorr Vegetable Dip Mix. It used to be called Vegetable Soup, now it has a bread bowl full of dip on the label.
3, not the 4 cups of water the package says you need if it even still has the soup directions.
1 box beef or chicken broth or two cans, beef and low sodium is better.
1 can tomato soup, undiluted
1 can tomato puree, crushed or diced tomatoes. If you really like tomatoes, add more.
1 can V8 Juice ( I use low sodium)
1 can ready to eat vegetable soup - preferably no rice or pasta, but whatever. Again, low sodium.
1 -2 cans crab meat - one should be lump or claw, the regular stuff is tiny bits like some tuna. I've found one of each to be best, the teeny tiny crab bits become part of the broth.
1 TBS Old Bay Seasoning or seafood seasoning. Old Bay is the real deal: 1-2 tsp if you're not a fan of spice, more if you are.
Salt, pepper, parsley, onion and garlic powder to taste
Beef or chicken bullion to taste

* To make myself feel like a real cook, I saute fresh veggies in olive oil and butter first:
Carrots, celery, onion, red, yellow, orange or green pepper, garlic, bits of chopped greens, diced potato - anything goes.

I also add frozen peas and sometimes frozen vegetables - corn, green beans, again, whatever.

You can add shrimp if you've got em, I've even added leftover fish. Put them in towards the end of the cooking though, or they'll likely turn mushy.

Of course, if you have fresh tomatoes, or better yet, fresh seafood, use them.

Bring everything to a boil and simmer until you can't wait anymore. You have to wait long enough for the Knorr soup to finish cooking, at least 10 minutes. The longer, the better.

Serve with a green salad and warm bread and you're welcome.

If you're really feeling anxious or just love to be in the kitchen, you can make the bread yourself. I  make the overnight no knead recipes done in the dutch oven, because I can't screw them up, and they are the best with soups. But that loaf from the grocery store works just fine too.

xo

Joss Whedon is resigned to the “Zomney” apocalypse

Seriously, this is hilarious. And frightening.






Joss Whedon is resigned to the “Zomney” apocalypse

Share it if you dare......

Oh, October

There's something about October.

Maybe it's the changing scenery, the looming seasons, the fleeting daylight,

I don't know, but October always seems to be a busy time around here.

The last 10 days have been a blur of activity.

Last weekend:

Homecoming Parade:

 

Followed by the Homecoming Dance:

 aren't they adorable?

and isn't it remarkable that our 15 year old daughter in flats,

stands so tall next to her 6'6" daddy?

Watched two days of volleyball tournaments, our farthest away,

2nd place finish!

Then this weekend,

Son came home,  his girlfriend too.

Aren't they something?

I miss having him around.

 Took 2 hour long walks, one with the furry child and the husband,

the other by myself, and I did this hill twice because I could.

I saw some amazing skies, my favorite this double sun dog sunset with plane trails,

So to recap, lately,

I drove over 400 miles in the name of volleyball,

went to a parade and many sporting events,

learned MS Publisher to make a program for senior night,

went out for Thai food with my girlfriends,

took about 250 pictures,

made giant batches of crab soup and chili,

watched movies with my kids,

had some cocktails with my husband,

enjoyed the lovely fall weather,

ate my first caramel apple,

put out some Halloween decorations, 

went back to therapy for more needling, thanks to a nasty flare up of neck joint pain,

did so many loads of laundry I lost count,

got my house as cleaned as I get it,

had a couple of existential hormonal meltdowns, but I got over them,

oh, and,

 started up a company with my husband.

Tonight I have to make pasta for 25 for the volleyball team.

Lots going on in my little world.

So far, so good.

I'll check in when I can.

Dry Needle Reboot Inspired Ramble

(Or when a pain in your neck becomes a pain in your life)

Oh, it's not all sunshine and fall colors here. Truth be told, I've been a mess.
And now I'm going to tell you all about it, my old lady problems, my fears.


I've been caught in my spiral of physical and mental pain, and once again, I was becoming consumed with worry that something was wrong with me, which has been Fear Number Two since my babies were born. Fear Number One, of course, being something wrong with my babies. Fear Number Two is intricately woven into Fear Number One, because babies need a Mama to take care of them, get them places, nurse them when they're sick, help them through the rough patches in life, give them skills to navigate safely through the world, and so on. It's a perfect infinity loop of worry, Fear One and Fear Two.

They're not babies any more, but those worries haven't diminished, they've actually grown over me like ivy on a brick wall, part of my landscape. My life's landscape has been colored with kudzu vines of worries, illnesses, surgeries, and dying of family and friends from my earliest memories. I carry heart disease and cancer and dementia in my genetic code, so it's hard not to panic at the littlest of things. Add menopause hormone imbalances and sleep deprivation into the mix, then add in neck arthritis with nerve impingement with symptoms that mimic heart attack, and I get a pretty hearty worry stew. (And I'm only going to talk about a facet or my worries today, not even going to go down the big long term world going to hell in a handbasket worries for my babies' futures path - that's a whole other conversation.)

I spend a lot of restless nights telling myself that I'm fine that I'm a worrier that I'm not full of clogged arteries that I don't have cancer that I won't die in my sleep on the nights my husband is out of town that if I can just get to sleep I will be better in the morning that each new ache and pain is old age nothing more and damn I don't want to be old, I suck at it, etc... Another perfect infinity loop of anxiety and self loathing for being such a worrier. That voice in the background calling me weak and worrisome, saying Buck up little camper! life could be so much worse, you haven't keeled over yet, you don't deserve to worry like this, you don't know what trouble is, the worrying is going to get you before anything real can...... like a stuck record. It's a chicken and egg argument too: is the worry causing the pain or is the pain causing the worry? I believe, I know that the pain causes the worry, because I've got actual, real physical things that cause pain, thank you very much, previous doctors who misdiagnosed the arthritis and herniations as stress and prescribed the
many anti anxiety drugs that made my life worse, not better. It is a cascade. But I digress.....

I reached my breaking point last month, short term memory shot to shit, headaches and chest pains and numbness in extremities on top of the hot flashes and crazy heart, so I went back to my doctor and just let it all out. I told her I'm going insane with the worry, that the xanax and melatonin weren't helping me relax or sleep and I was a tightly wound ball of stress, a hot mess.  Let me say that I love my doctor. I'd love to spend an evening over a bottle of wine laughing with her, she's an awesome person. Practical as hell too. She knows I can't do the hormones, that I'm in the high risk for cancer group and have to just deal with the menopause mayhem. She knows my family history of heart attacks in the mid 40's and early 50's is freaking me out. She knows I've got a compressed nerve bundle in my neck and I'm terrified of the surgery because the reconstruction required back there is substantial. She can feel the hard as steel muscles in my neck and back, wound tight as a spring and she can tell I'm coming unhinged.

So she said here's what we're going to do. Quit the xanax right now and start taking a muscle relaxer to loosen up the neck issues. Get an xray and be sure there's nothing new happening in the neck. Schedule a stress echo to take the heart worries off the table. Go back to physical therapy for the neck and if that doesn't help, get some more steroid shots back there. And most of all, get some sleep. She's a big believer in the physical manifestations of sleep deprivation, and I am too.

Of course my heart is fine and there were no new developments in my neck, just the same old bone spur compressing nerves causing all this mayhem from head to toe. I'm not a big medication taker, I'm the hyper-sensitive patient that breaks pills in half, that has twice the side effects, but I'd been on low dose ativan or xanax for a long time, because at the time, I needed them. Stopping xanax was a trippy couple of days - I felt like I was on drugs more off them than on, but it was over soon. From what I've read, if you've been on high doses for a while, you can be seriously messed up coming off them. Lucky for me I'm a medication wussie on low doses. I only took the muscle relaxers a few times for a week too, half a pill of course, because I felt sedated the next day. But I could feel them working their magic on my aching neck and back, and the sleep was wonderful.

My doctor sent me to a new place for neck rehab, and this being my fourth round, I wasn't expecting too much. I was pleasantly surprised. My therapist Kate was awesome, especially because she didn't chastise me for failing to maintain my strengthening exercises. She taught me so much about how my body was working and how to help it with gentle stretches and little exercises, ones I didn't know about. Better than any previous therapist, she showed and explained and taught me how things worked and she rebooted my thought processes a little too. She asked if she could try dry needling, a form of acupuncture and despite my needle phobia I said yes. At this point I'd have said yes to an exorcism if she thought it would help.

Dry needling is not fun. Acupuncture needles don't hurt going in, I learned, but in dry needling they insert needles along the spine, then twist needles into trigger points in the muscles on the opposite side of the neck to induce spasms. You take the tightly wound, stressed out cramped up muscles that can't relax and say HEY! Here's some stress for you. It was like inducing several charlie horse cramps into my shoulders and back. It was excruciating for about 5 minutes. Kate said if you need to cuss you can, but I settled for a few Owies! and palms full of sweat. They're sweating right now just thinking about it. Kate told me to expect some soreness, like the kind when you overdo an exercise and not to take any anti-inflammatories if I could help it, they wanted the muscles to be inflamed. I went home sore and day two I was really sore, but day three I was a little better. The next week we did it again, and soon the numbness and tingling in my extremities was gone - completely gone, the headaches much less frequent and best of all, the muscles in my shoulders and neck were relaxed for the first time in years. Years. It's funny how you get used to things, accept them as the way life has to be, and you don't even realize how far gone you're gotten.

What I learned this time is to stop accepting the pain and the worry, to know when and how to whine to my doctor, to stop feeling like whiner when I do, to chip away at the worries by process of elimination, and mostly to try something new when all the old things haven't been working. I learned it's OK to complain when things are not right, and once again, I wish I'd complained and gotten help sooner. I wasted a miserable year telling myself that this is what it is and I had no option but the surgery I won't have. I learn over and over again what a complex tangle our physical and mental health can be, and what a supreme bitch nerve pain can be - it is impervious to meds and it does what it does in mysterious and painful ways. But it can be rebooted, short circuited and managed.  I also learned again what a privilege it is to have health insurance to allow me to afford this care. (Well sort of a privilege since we pay for the insurance ourselves and had to pay $7000 out of pocket, thank you hysterectomy surgery, to get to the deductible that let me not worry about the hundreds of dollars per hour the therapy cost - so I guess privileged that my hard working husband makes enough money that we can afford any of this in the first place.)

While I'm not pain free in my neck, and there's always a new ache in a joint waiting around the corner for me, I am much, much better. And much less crazy. And medication free, for the first time in years. Years. No ativan, no xanax, no muscle relaxers, no anti-inflammatory drugs, and I'm doing OK. Not great, not perfect, but OK. And OK is good enough for me right now.


And as my funny doctor said, you can quit worrying about your heart for now. As to getting hit by a bus when you walk out of here, that I can't help you with.

Ha ha ha.

It's helped me a little too this month to ask myself what exactly it is that I'm scared of:
Illness? Death? They happen to everyone. No one here gets out alive. I've given this great advise to friends facing cancer worries - Don't go to war until you know who the enemy is. If only I could take my own advice. Worrying about things that haven't happened yet is such a complete waste of energy. If something awful does happen, I hope I've got some worry left in reserve. But we can't change who we are or how we're made, can we? I guess all we can hope for is a reboot, a reprieve.

Also helping me this month is focusing on deep breathing when I'm worried, to try meditation, which I suck at, because my gerbil brain is not able to stop running  and be calm or still.
But I'm trying.

People who've had near death experiences aren't big worriers. They're not scared. They've seen the other side and came back rebooted and reassured. I've been reading a little bit about them this month too, hoping for some more perspective and a little psychic reboot of my own.

I will end with Frank Herbert's Litany Against Fear from the book Dune, used to bring calm in times of peril:

I must not fear.Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

Wordless Wednesday

Autumn Eye Candy

How can I be anything but happy to open my front door to this?

Or lucky to share it with a furry friend?

One week a year I am blessed with this lovely golden yellow canopy.

Tucker knows this is my favorite little tree and he waits patiently while I take too many photos.

The colors and hues change daily.

My favorite trick is to catch the sun through the leaves.

I pull up a chair and sit right in the midst of it for a good look.

This year's drought brought a new twist, half dead leaves.

I find them mesmerizing. They make me want to play with paints.

So much variation on one plant.

I experiment with the light - morning, evening. Both have their allure.

 Raspberry or lemon shebert?

I'm like a junkie for the scenery. I'm sure some brain chemicals are involved.

Everywhere I look I'm amazed by the colors I see.

I do this each year, take hundreds of photos of the fall leaves, each year is different and lovely in its own way. 

Each year I'm a little bit more grateful to be able to notice the world around me.

The leaves are falling so quickly, the wind is gusting with a cold front behind it.

Fleeting, too soon gone. Hence the pictures.

And this music in my head:

I have Virginia Creeper and dogwood and blackberry and so many other leaves waiting for their portraits to be edited and shared. 

Until then.